Hilariter

[Monday, May 21]

I have finally got some good news regarding the job--it's over. My parents have decided that a month in China with them would be vastly more therapeutic than living with the Brats. (It's also something to do with me going off to Singapore soon and being further separated, and with their impeding move of house, which will require spring-cleaning of the new house and arrangement of various possessions.) So they told me, by email and via the Empress, to get my visa ready and my passport and to get a ticket to the Big S, as soon as I can.

The Coconut said not to worry about her while I'm gone.

So far I've got two travel agents' numbers to call and compare prices and visa preparation durations. I do hope everything goes OK, or else I'm going to have to get a ticket to Wuhan, which might be more expensive than to the Big S and might require a transit flight into the bargain (I dislike transits). But at least I'm going to be merrily jobless after this week--from now on it's just a countdown to freedom.

In fact on Saturday night, I was grinning like a madman when I got to the email detailing my release from the clutches of employment. (The Gorillas, the Empress, and Claus were also around watching some football thingy on TV.) It was very nice to finally know the day had come when I would have to never lay eyes on the Brats again. I believe they'll be equally happy.

[Tuesday]

I told my aunt and uncle last night, in that order (actually my aunt told my uncle), and they seem to have taken the news very well. In fact they're offering to help me get my visa and tickets prepared for me--an offer I quickly accepted and thanked them for. Mercurial as they are, I shall never understand them--they seem to oscillate between mindsets so often that I'm never quite able to catch up to their current emotional state. I suppose I myself seem rather wooden to them, since I try not to show any emotion when offended... and I guess it seems I've been rather offended (or offensive? I have no idea) for the past few months.

I suppose I'm getting a bit of guilt here, but.. ah drat, I keep forgetting that people have good sides as well as bad. Probably because I tend to notice the bad bits first. I would assume God's still working on that, but the improvement is so slight--even after all these years--that I would almost call it negligible. But at least there's some improvement...

One other aspect of myself that irritates them (funny how I never noticed it before) appears to be my tendency to say I don't know--the office being an office, there're mounds of paperwork and files strewn about, and naturally every now and then something turns out missing--and when I'm asked, I always say I don't know. I guess they probably want a less technically correct answer and a more comforting one, something like "I think it's in that pile over there" or "Maybe under Mt. Everest" or something. My aunt was asking why I say I don't know last night, and as soon as I started talking about knowing implying certainty, and the presence of any guesswork or assumptions rendering certainty (and therefore knowledge) impossible, she started on about me needing too many definitions and thinking too complicatedly.

I never knew that my habit of using definitions would drive people mad. It's generally people not using definitions that drive me mad, besides--I never thought about the vice-versa side of things.

So today I'm going to have to make a lot more phone calls--to agents, asking after ticket prices and dates and suchlike, while also calling the Gorillas to tell them I'll be stopping by their place tonight (I have to pick my passport and a few passport-sized photos to prepare my visa). I hope the photos don't give the wrong impression--photos of myself invariably turn out somehow deformed. Or maybe my face is deformed anyway and one can't blame the poor camera; but really--my IC and passport photos make me look like some escaped criminal on the run; several other photos have a sort of retarded air about them; at least one of them looks deathly grim; and in all of them there is no trace of a smile. It may be as D-Kun said, that I'm not photogenic.

Or that photos simply aren't me-genic.

One of my collegaues has vanished. I wonder what happened. From the others' refusal to tell me, I'm assuming her disappearance (or simply non-appearance) wasn't self-caused... ah. They've told me, and my assumption was correct. Apparently I should have been noticing her difficulties for the past few weeks... well, maybe now I have a reasonable cause for my aunt's, hmmm, emotions last night. It does, however, make it seem that I'm a rather unobservant person. Which I probably am--or maybe that I simply observe different things from most other people. It might be an indication of why people seem to think I see everything differently, and why I don't seem to find any difference between my thought patterns and theirs until I ask to find out.

Sheesh. People will insist on being complicated despite all my attempts to rationalise their behaviour... it's almost an argument for the existence of free will all on its own.

[Wednesday]

Probably the nicest thing about working for relatives is that one gets to walk in late and get away with simpler explanations. Obviously stuff like "I had to attend my grandmother's funeral" is unusable, but then I get to use "The bus was late" or "I caused a malfunction in the subway", both of which were true today. (I've never had to use the second line before.)

Actually what happened this morning was that I had to go to an agent's office to deposit my passport for a visa application. (I finally found one who seemed pretty cheap and all that, and got parental permission.) Well, the office happened to be near the Low One area, which I'm unfortunately unfamiliar with, so I got directions to go there. It's a great pity that I didn't get directions for the way back--Jogger says The Way Back equals The Way There inversed, but as far as I can tell I took two absolutely different routes. Then again, I guess the landmarks for each part of the journey are different, which (in my book) makes them two different routes.

So the itinerary went something like this: I went to the agent's office without too much trouble, got all the necessary formalities over with, left my uncle's number with him (my uncle kindly agreed to pay for my tickets with his credit card in lieu of my parents' absence) and left. That's when all the trouble began, because I'd forgotten the earlier directions I took to get there and therefore couldn't reverse the sequence to get back, and as a result went around in hopeless circles while asking for directions from guards with rotten linguistic skills all the way.

Well... that's the official version, anyway. The truth of the matter is that if I had wanted to, I'd probably have been able to get un-lost in a hurry (and with the help of a few directions). My sister happens to want an album from some obscure Christian group... well, they're probably not that obscure, but they simply happen to be un-heard-of in here... Claus suggested to try a certain store in Gold River. And another RBS classmate mentioned that there's a costume shop (?!) on the top floor of the same complex, where hats are sold. And Low One, behind Gold River, happens to be selling 2-GB thumbdrives at roughly 50 or 60 these days, and a little more memory never hurt anybody.

So I began hunting for those, and it was half an hour and many questions for directions later that I found out I was hunting on the wrong side of the road. And then by the time I managed to jaywalk across the road, it was some more minutes later--the traffic was in an unfriendly mood.

And then I found out that all the abovementioned places are closed for business at 9am, and I had to make my way back to the Star Hill (where do they get these names?) Monorail Station, and from there to the office. And then it turned out that the doors on the LRT are marked Do Not Lean for a rather different reason than I'd thought before.

I always thought you shouldn't lean on them because you might fall out if they open suddenly; it turns out that if you lean on them, and are wearing a backpack (as I was), when the doors open they drag part of your backpack along and jam it into the small space between the door and the wall of the train. In my case, all this happened without my knowledge. And then when the doors try to close again, they realise there's a blockage and so send error messages and refuse to close. I only realised the bag was causing all the delay when a lady on the train told me my bag was jammed in the door. It was quite firmly jammed, too--fortunately it was empty, so I didn't have to worry about ripping anything while pulling it out. The backpack itself is very durable so I didn't worry about that.

But the upshot of the whole thing was that I (and the rest of the passengers on the train) were delayed by about 10 minutes while some engineer did some hasty fix-ups to it.

And then when I got to the final station, where I usually take a bus the rest of the way to the office, the bus was there. That's always a good thing, except when the conductor is inside, with a broom, and sweeping various articles of dirt out of it. It turned into another 15-minute-or-so wait while the conductor cleaned his bus to his own satisfaction, expressing said satisfaction by spitting onto the left rear tyre, and then went off to reward himself with a cigarette... so by the time I reached the office it was almost 11.

(To get things more or less into perspective, I'd left the agent's office at about 9.45am.)

[Thursday]

Tomorrow is my planned last day of work, although my uncle and aunt are, hmm, encouraging me to stay on at work until the day before I fly. I'm not planning to appear at the office again after tomorrow, though, except maybe on Monday when I have to drop by to pick up the clothes I'll be leaving behind... some of them, after all, are going to have to be washed and dried and folded and all that. So I'll have to phone them on Sunday night to make arrangements about said picking-up... to make sure it's as brief a contact as possible. Maybe I'll take the Empress along, but I'm afraid that might cause the visit to be unnecessarily prolonged.

Still, I do have to get to Gold River that day anyway, to pick up my visa and tickets. And maybe while I'm there, I'll be able to find the hat I've wanted for so long... and if I do, I'll want the Empress around to have a voice of reason to interfere with my inner impulse buyer. So it won't be too difficult to drop by the office for a bit while I'm trotting about town any way; and I do think the Empress deserves a bit of a break from exam fever.

(Her A-Levels started on Tuesday.)

I found it remarkably difficult to get anything done today... I mean, I did get quite a bit of paperwork out of the way, but really my mind was more on the soon-to-come shopping spree.

(In my terms, a day in which I spend more than thirty ringgit on more than three items is a day in which I go on a shopping spree.) And fortunately the timing will be such that I'll have my "allowance" safely in my wallet... well, not very safe, but you get the idea.

Still, we'll see if I can become more convincing than my uncle and aunt with regards to staying at their place over Monday and Tuesday. I'm planning to wax eloquent on the difficulty of obtaining the things I want; my need of several things from all over the place; and the fact that my check-in time is extremely late and the Brats have school the next day. I hope to be very eloquent and convincing indeed... but I probably won't be. Still, it's my life from here on, so I think they're more or less obliged to go along with my wishes in this area. I think I just hope not to hurt their feelings.

The oldest Brat put on a gala screaming performance last night, and the best thing is I didn't have anything to do with it so I wasn't blamed. From what I heard, "everybody" in her class is going to some place on some outing and they won't be back until 8pm. "Everybody" turned out to mean "everybody who was asked", and that turned out to be eight people (out of a class of 40 people). Her parents refused her request on the grounds that 8pm is too late for any decent 12-year-old to be out of a house, and that her grades are already suffering enough without another jaunt out, and that if she wanted to go, they'd go with her (and be back before 8pm). She began screaming and sobbing.

Well... I hate to admit it--it sounds almost as if I'm developing an amygdala--but I actually pitied her. It's probably a situation that everybody goes through in their adolescence--wanting to go somewhere without the family somewhere in the back- (or fore-) ground. I know I went through it for a bit, but being the pliable homebody that I am, it didn't last very long--only while I was 12, I think. And even then I didn't scream or whatever... I think. The Empress probably remembers better. But the situation last night was one that's occurred often enough in my family, I should imagine.

In fact from all the garbled words I heard last night, it seems that she's developed a minor persecution complex and imagines that everybody in the world is out to get her. (I could probably correct her by saying that there're 6.5 billion people who couldn't care less.) And then the youngest Brat began butting in on the one-way conversation, which I didn't like at all. I've always thought it's unfair when, during a scolding administered by a parent, another sibling butts in to tell the one being scolded exactly what they did wrong and how terrible they are. That's the parent's job, and in any case the interruption is extremely impolite, as well as being plain cruel. And unnecessary. And... but you get my point. I think that if I find myself scolding somebody, the person who butts in to add to my scolding is going to get a double portion, and probably a rather harsher portion too.

(I regret to say I've indulged myself in cruelty to humans before.)

In any case it seems to have blown over now. I do declare this mercurial temper of theirs is something I'm never going to quite get used to. It doesn't seem to take much more than a feather to get all sorts of interesting dialogue out of them...

I'm going to be in China this time next week. In fact this time next week, I'll probably already be in Wuhan. It's something to think about. Unfortunately it does mean that I'll be unable to access Blogger for awhile, but since I will (I hope) have a laptop by then, I can simply jot down all the happenings and put 'em up in a one-shot post when I get back. If you thought my posts were long before, just you wait 'til I dump one month on you. In one post, no less. I bet Herr Robson will go into conniptions, and everybody else will have a fit.

And nobody will manage to quite finish the post.

*grin*